Floating A Sub Plot

Will Glasnost Torpedo `The Hunt For Red October`?

February 25, 1990|By Iain Blair.

We may have entered an era of glasnost and perestroika in real life, but when ``The Hunt for Red October`` sails onto the silver screen in Chicago Friday the audience will be plunged back into the Dark Ages of The Cold War and tense American-Soviet relationships, circa 1980.

The naval thriller, based on the best seller of the same name by Tom Clancy, has a simple if somewhat chilling premise. A veteran captain of a Soviet nuclear submarine apparently suddenly decides to defect, bringing along with him his officers and his ship, the Red October, with its revolutionary new propulsion system.

The ship and the men would be prize catches for America and her intelligence community. Except that Moscow insists that, in reality, the renegade commander is mad and intent on launching a solo nuclear strike against the States.

Does Washington help the Soviets hunt down and destroy the maverick submarine, or do we gamble that the captain is indeed a bona fide defector, and do everything we can to help him escape?

(who plays an American submarine commander) and James Earl Jones (who plays Admiral James Greer), with relative newcomer Alec Baldwin, appearing in his first lead role as Clancy`s hero, CIA analyst Jack Ryan.

It turns out that Baldwin, who has been busy up `til now playing supporting roles in such films as ``Married to the Mob,`` ``Working Girl`` and ``Beetlejuice,`` got his big break when producer Mace Neufeld, whose last hit was another American-Russian military thriller, ``No Way Out,`` couldn`t get Kevin Costner for the role.

``He was busy shooting `Revenge` in Mexico and was then committed to directing his own film,`` says Neufeld. ``We then met Alec, and the moment he walked in the room we knew he was Ryan. Why? Because he looked just right-he`s good-looking but not pretty. He was our first actor to be signed.``

Surprisingly, it turns out that Connery was the last actor to come aboard the project, which Neufeld had been developing since 1984, when he first optioned the book. ``Klaus Maria Brandauer was originally going to play Ramius, but he, too, became unavailable at the last minute, and they asked me,`` says Connery, who happened to be between projects.

However, when he first read the script, Connery almost didn`t commit.

``They faxed it to me without the prologue at the beginning, which changed a lot of things,`` he points out. ``For example, the fact that it`s set pre-Gorbachev made an enormous difference. It was imperative it had to be pre-Gorbachev, which is just as well considering everything that`s happened in Eastern Europe recently. Times have certainly changed.``

Connery, who first visited Russia some 25 years ago to make ``The Red Tent,`` and who recently returned to Moscow and Leningrad to film John LeCarre`s spy thriller ``The Russia House,`` is well-qualified to speak about such changes.

``When I was there 25 years ago, they were nothing like as cooperative as they are now, for obvious reasons,`` he says. ``But this time, the man who`s in charge of the film industry there was instrumental in us getting access to anything and everything, and the police were the best and most cooperative I`ve ever worked with, in any country, which is quite odd.

``When I was there before, you never knew where you were. You were just told, `No, you can`t do that.` I had a different driver every day, and he knew me but I didn`t know him. I`d be standing there like the laundry waiting to be picked up. The interpreters I had were invariably KGB people. I`m not saying they`re not now, but they`re younger now, more girls than boys, and very outgoing and very attracted to religion. A lot of them had been baptized, and we`d talk about it. They all knew I`d been there before, and some had worked in Canada and elsewhere. So they were a lot more overt and opinionated and aware of all the changes.``

Does Connery feel that recent events have dated ``The Hunt for Red October``? ``Someone put it to LeCarre that he and Len Deighton and the other spy novelists are all out of business because of glasnost. But, of course, that`s not true, because none of these countries are going to function without their intelligence services, whether they`re called secret police or counter- espionage,`` he points out.

Baldwin agrees. ``Perhaps recent events in Europe have altered the perspective on this film, but to me, the political backdrop of the film is really insignificant. It`s the story of these two men that`s important. It`s not about political friction.``